# NEON Game of Life

> Neon cellular-automata sandbox

Canonical page: [https://chrome-stats.com/d/id1465996787](https://chrome-stats.com/d/id1465996787)

## Overview

- **ID:** `id1465996787`
- **Platform:** Apple
- **Type:** Apple app
- **Status:** Available
- **Publisher:** Enzo Maruffa
- **Category:** Simulation
- **Rating:** 4.40 / 5 (7 ratings)
- **Version:** 3.0.1
- **Last updated:** 2026-07-10
- **First published:** 2019-05-31
- **Size:** 26 MB
- **Data as of:** 2026-09-06
- **Store listing:** [Apple App Store](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/neon-game-of-life/id1465996787)
- **Privacy policy:** [https://github.com/enzomaruffa/neon-game-of-life-privacy/blob/main/PRIVACY.md](https://github.com/enzomaruffa/neon-game-of-life-privacy/blob/main/PRIVACY.md)

## Description

Grow glowing, living patterns from a single tap. Paint a spark, hit play, and watch gliders streak and guns fire across a hypnotic neon grid. The Game of Life, alive.

NEON is Conway's Game of Life, reborn in neon. Paint a handful of glowing cells, hit play, and watch them breed, drift, and collide — gliders streak across the grid, pulsars breathe, and a Gosper gun throws spaceships into the dark.

It's a sandbox, not a screensaver. Every tool for building and studying patterns is free.

THE SIMULATION — free
— 12 rulesets: Conway (B3/S23), HighLife, Day & Night, Amoeba, Mazectric, Coral, Diamoeba and more — plus a B/S rule builder for your own totalistic rules.
— Toroidal grids sized to your device, driven by a GPU compute kernel that keeps up.
— A per-cell procedural neon shader — no sprites; every living cell is drawn live.

PAINT & EDIT — free
— Paint or erase with a fingertip; a live loupe magnifies exactly the cell under your finger.
— Region select: marquee any rectangle, then copy, cut, clear, save as a snippet, or export as RLE. Paste it anywhere.
— 20 canonical snippets (block, glider, LWSS, pulsar, queen-bee shuttle…) with live toroidal previews. Drag to stamp; rotate or flip before you drop.
— Symmetry brush — 2-, 4-, or 8-fold mirrored drawing.
— Full LifeWiki RLE round-trip: paste, fetch from a URL, or open a .rle file, plus a raw-text editor over the live grid.

STUDY — free
— A 15-pattern Discover catalog: Gosper gun, Simkin gun, acorn, R-pentomino, replicator, garden of Eden — with provenance.
— Timeline scrubber — pause and rewind all the way back to the first generation.
— Population sparkline, live cell count, generation counter, and stability detection (still life / period-N oscillator / extinction).
— Minimap and stats HUD, both toggleable right on the canvas.

SHARE — free
— Pattern links: every soup encodes into a neongameoflife:// URL you can drop in a message. No server, no account.
— Record the canvas to MP4 or GIF. Full iPad keyboard shortcuts.

NEON PRO — optional
A one-time purchase, family-shareable, no subscription. Every tool for building and studying patterns is free; Pro is the finish — more speed, surface, and instrumentation.
— Fast-forward to 1,000 generations/second.
— Arbitrary grid sizes and a 16×16 custom snippet creator.
— iCloud sync of your library across devices.
— An interactive Home Screen widget and a Dynamic Island Live Activity, each running a live mini-sim.
— Pattern labels that identify gliders, oscillators, and still lifes and track them as they move.
— An activity heatmap that renders cell-flip frequency as a cool-to-hot overlay.
— A 3D time-stack you can orbit — every generation stacked in space, from a single instanced draw.
— A neon palette editor, animated themes, and cell trails.
— 15 alternate app icons drawn from classic patterns.

PRIVACY
No accounts, no tracking, no third-party SDKs, no analytics. Your patterns live on your device and, if you opt in, in your own iCloud private database. Share links carry the pattern inline — nothing touches a server.

Built in Swift + SwiftUI, from a 2019 SpriteKit experiment rebuilt from the compute kernel up.

## Rankings

- #389,748 — Overall

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Source: [Chrome-Stats](https://chrome-stats.com/d/id1465996787)